Custom Search Engine

A new look for Custom Search control panel

2013-03-13T06:00:00.000-07:00

We’re excited to announce a new, modern design for the control panel in keeping with prior user experience changes to Custom Search. You’ll also find a more intuitive layout to the various controls and configuration options. While configuring a Custom Search Engine, you can immediately view and test your work within the control panel.

We hope you enjoy the new look!

Posted by: Neelesh Bodas and Brent VerWeyst, Custom Search team

A simple, yet powerful custom search engine

2013-01-16T05:40:00.000-08:00

Simplicity and speed are two principles we love when it comes to design at Google. Today, we’re excited to announce the new CSE layout that displays results in an overlay, on top of any content on your page.

What this means for developers:

Takes seconds to create. We simplified the creation interface to get you going faster.
One snippet for search box and results. Place it where you want your search box to appear.
Powerful features now come by default: autocomplete, image thumbnails and results sorting.

What this means for your users:

Uninterrupted browsing experience.
Faster, more simple search means more chances for your users to discover great content from your site.

You may visit W3Schools to see the new layout in action or use the CSE below which searches our blog.

Try out the new layout by creating a new search engine. It takes less than a minute. Once you have your search engine snippet ready, simply paste it on your website.

Posted by Manolis Kounelakis and Neelesh Bodas, Custom Search team

Introducing Custom Search Element v2

2012-08-03T09:13:00.000-07:00

Custom Search Engine (CSE) allows you to incorporate rich search functionality into your website. You do this by adding specific HTML markup - known as the Custom Search element - to web pages on your site. The Custom Search element renders a search experience (search boxes and results pages) on your site’s pages. By controlling the placement of the Custom Search element on your pages and configuring your CSE settings, you can create customized layouts that are tuned for the look-and-feel of your website.

We’re happy to announce today a new, improved version of the Custom Search element. Here are some of the key highlights and improvements of what we call Custom Search element v2.

Search UI is rendered based on the settings stored on the Google CSE servers. This means that any configuration changes you make in the CSE control panel will automatically be reflected on your web pages the next time they reload. You no longer need to copy-and-paste new element code into your website when you modify your CSE using the control panel.

All element code is loaded asynchronously for reduced page load times.

Client-side customization allows you to overwrite global CSE settings on a per-page basis. For example, you can enable search history, disable auto search on page load, configure different Google Analytics parameters, and more. Customization is done through an easy-to-use HTML syntax which does not require any Javascript knowledge.

To start using Custom Search element v2 on your website, go to the “Get code” section of the CSE control panel and follow the instructions shown there.

We’ll continue to support older versions of the Custom Search element for the time being but encourage you to update your CSE implementation to take advantage of the improvements.

Posted by Ying Huang, Software Engineer

Ads background colors in Custom Search

2012-06-15T13:19:00.000-07:00

As we continue to improve the look and feel of Google Custom Search Engine (CSE), today we’re announcing a change in how ads are displayed on CSE search results pages.

Currently ads in CSE results are shown in a separate section from organic search results labeled “Ads by Google”. With this latest change, the ads section will also have a distinct background color, in keeping with the visual style of ads on the google.com search results page.

Because CSE allows you to choose from one of several built-in styles, the ads background color is different for each style to contrast in a visually appealing way with the default background color. (Note that if you customize the main background color, the ads background color will automatically match it to avoid clashing.)

The following screenshots illustrate what a user performing a custom search on a website might see, for two of the built-in CSE styles.

This change in design provides users another way to distinguish ads in CSE search result pages.

CSE publishers will see these changes effective immediately. As always, please let us know any questions or feedback in our discussion forum.

Posted by MyLinh Yang, Product Manager

Sorting and Filtering Results in Custom Search

2012-05-09T08:24:00.000-07:00

Using Custom Search Engine (CSE), you can create rich search experiences that make it easier for visitors to find the information they’re looking for on your site. Today we’re announcing two improvements to sorting and filtering of search results in CSE.

First, CSE now supports UI-based results sorting, which you can enable in the Basics tab of the CSE control panel. Once you’ve updated the CSE element code on your site, a “sort by” picker will become visible at the top of the results section.

By default CSE supports sorting by date and relevance. In the control panel, you can specify additional “sort by” keys that are based on the structure of your site’s content, giving users more options to find the results that are most relevant to them. For example, if you’ve marked up pages for product rich snippets, you could enable sorting based on price as shown below:

Second, we’re introducing compact queries for filtering by attribute. Currently you can issue a query like

[more:pagemap:product-description:search more:pagemap:product-description:engine]

which will only show pages with a ‘product-description’ attribute that contains both ‘search’ and ‘engine’. With a compact query, you can issue the same request as:
[more:p:product-description:search*engine]

We hope these new features help you create richer and more useful search experiences for your visitors. As always, if you have any questions or feedback please let us know via our Help Forum.

Posted by Roger Wang, Software Engineer

A new look for Custom Search results plus a new search box

2012-03-12T15:52:00.000-07:00

We’re excited to announce that starting today, we are providing a new results style that’s more modern and streamlined, based on the evolving Google design and experience across Google properties.

This look will be the new default for new custom search engines, and admins of existing custom search engines can also choose this new style by visiting the Look and feel page of their CSE’s control panel and selecting “Default” in the Choose or customize a style section. The old default remains an option, but has been renamed to “Classic”.

In addition to the new style for results, we’ve also updated the search box and made autocomplete more robust and consistent with the standard Google autocomplete. Note that this update affects all CSEs that use the Element so, in some rare cases, site owners who have made customizations to their CSE search box (or who have enabled autocomplete for their own search boxes) may need to make minor updates to accommodate the new search box’s slightly different look.

We hope you and your visitors enjoy these updates. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Dana Bright, UI Designer

Image results now available from the Custom Search API

2012-02-14T11:58:00.000-08:00

Last year we added image results to Google Custom Search Engines to enable sites to offer image-only results that showcase photos and other digital images. For site owners who want more flexibility in presentation, they are also now available from the Custom Search API.

Read more about accessing Image Results from the Custom Search API or try it out in the Custom Search API Explorer. For billing purposes, image queries will be treated the same as web queries. Note that you need to enable image search in your custom search engine control panel for the custom image search to work.

Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Nam Nguyen, Software Engineer

Businesses: share Google Site Search query quota between multiple engines

2012-02-02T08:21:00.000-08:00

Good news for Google Site Search owners who manage multiple Google Site Search engines! You can now share query quota between paid GSS and free Custom Search engines.

This may be useful for you if you pay for a quota with Google Site Search and you’d like to share that quota with your Custom Search engines. To do this, add those extra engines to a “business group” to share the quota.

To add CSEs to a business group, visit the Business Group page of your GSS’s Control Panel. Click Add and you’ll see a list of the free CSEs that you own or that have been shared with you. Select the free CSEs you wish to add and click OK. All group members will immediately share the quota of your GSS.

We hope you’ll find this much easier than trying to estimate your quota needs for each of your individual search engines. To learn more about Business Groups, please visit our help center. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Yong Zhu, Software Engineer

A new and easy way to add new pages to your Custom Search Engine’s index

2012-01-24T09:27:00.000-08:00

Our users have been telling us that while they love the concept of on-demand indexing, manually entering URLs or keeping a Sitemap up to date is too cumbersome. A new year brings a new and improved solution. If you are a Webmaster Tools verified site owner and have a page that links to your site’s latest content, simply provide us with that page’s URL and we will periodically visit it to discover your site’s new content.

For example, as the owners of this blog, we can provide the URL of the blog’s landing page, googlecustomsearch.blogspot.com, to our CSE. It will then periodically visit that URL and add any new links to content on this blog to our CSE’s index. Since this URL automatically links to all new content on this blog, our CSE’s index will always automatically get updated.

You can provide a URL(s) to your CSE via the URLs linked from a page feature in the Indexing page of your CSE’s Control Panel. Note that this feature is only for the discovery of new content and does not refresh content that has already been indexed.

To learn more about URLs linked from a page, please visit our help center. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Liqian Luo, Software Engineer

Custom Search JavaScript API is now fully documented!

2012-01-13T13:56:00.000-08:00

The Custom Search engineers spent 2011 launching great features. But we still hear from our users that our documentation could do with improvement. We hear you. Today we’re launching some updates to our docs:

Comprehensive JavaScript reference for the Custom Search Element. We’ve completely overhauled our Custom Search Element API documentation to provide a comprehensive overview of all the JavaScript methods available. We can’t wait to see what you build with it.

More languages. The Help Center is now available in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Easier navigation and cleaner design. We’ve reorganized the Help Center to make it easier to find the information you’re looking for. Navigation is simpler and more streamlined. Individual articles have been revised and updated, and designed to be more readable.

Documentation is an ongoing effort, and we’ll be continuing to improve both our Help Center and our developer documentation. If you have comments or suggestions, we’d love to see them in our user forum.

Posted by: Riona MacNamara, technical writer

Improvements to Autocomplete

2011-12-09T09:26:00.001-08:00

Custom Search Autocompletions allow you to add to the list of useful queries users see as they type in the search box. Today we are announcing two major improvements.

Promotions in Autocomplete:

Promotions are a great way to call special attention to a result by putting it at the top of search results and making it visually distinct. Now you can choose to display them in autocomplete too. To enable this feature, simply click Show promotions in autocomplete in the Promotions section of your CSE’s Control Panel. Note that promotions based on regular expressions or the $q variable will not appear in autocomplete.

If you’d like to have promotions that appear in autocomplete but not in search results, you can add them via the new Autocomplete Promotion tab of the Custom Autocompletions in the Autocompletion section of your CSE’s Control Panel.

Match mode:

Match mode give you options for how Google displays autocompletions. The following are now available in the Promotions section of your CSE’s Control Panel. Changes to match mode will require you to update the CSE code snippet on your site.

Prefix (default) mode matches the opening words of the user’s query: “how to bake” will trigger “how to bake a pie”.
Ordered mode doesn’t require the words to be in the opening, but their order must match the user’s query: “bake a pie” will trigger “how to bake a pie”.
Any mode matches regardless of the order of the words in the user’s query. “pie bake” will trigger “how to bake a pie”.

We hope these new options make autocompletions even more useful for your site. Read more about Promotions in Autocomplete and Match mode. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Min Zeng, Software Engineer

Image Results for your Custom Search Engine

2011-12-01T10:46:00.001-08:00

Since the launch of Custom Search in 2006, CSE has powered searches on a broad range of sites on the web. Until now, those CSEs have only returned text-based results, but in some cases images can be a much faster, easier and more visually appealing way to search. For photos-focused sites, image results are a great way to showcase your beautiful photos and help visitors to your site quickly and easily find the photos they want. We also think sites focused on news, celebrities, art and digital production assets will similarly benefit.

Now you can add an image results tab to your CSE to offer your visitors image-only results in a variety of image-optimized presentation formats. Once you enable this feature, your CSE will have two tabs. The first has your current web search results and the second, Image tab, contains the image search results. Here’s an example from India-Forums.com:

Enabling image results is easy! Just visit the Basics page of your CSE’s Control Panel and check the Enable image search checkbox. You can change the layout of your image results on the Look and feel page.

Once enabled, you’ll also be able to get separate image search reports from your CSE’s Statistics page.

This new feature is available to all users of our Custom Search Element (you will need to Get Code and update your site). Since we are transitioning all iframe users to the Element, this should be most sites. Our Google Site Search users can also access Image Results via XML. To learn more about Image Search for Custom Search, please visit our help center. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Update: check out the New York Times Image Search app powered by Google Custom Search.

Posted by: Peng Zhao, Software Engineer

More flexibility for promotions

2011-11-22T10:38:00.001-08:00

Custom Search promotions enable you to put relevant information at the top of your search results for specific queries.

Today, we’re announcing several new features to give you more flexibility on how and when to trigger them.

Regular expressions: Use regular expressions instead of verbatim query matches to make it easier to display your promotions for all relevant user queries.

Promotion URL and titles based on the user’s query: Instead of manually adding and maintaining a long list of similarly structured URLs and promotion titles, now you can use the $q variable in your promotion URL or title to replace it with the user’s query.

Enable/disable individual promotions: Manually enable or disable each promotion without affecting the others.

Promotions for Custom Search engines created in AdSense: Promotions now work for these CSEs (though they are still managed via the CSE’s control panel on the Google Custom Search site).

We hope these new features make it easier for you to use promotions on your site. For more details and instructions, please visit our help center. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Weiyu Zhu, Software Engineer

Iframe Custom Search Engines are transitioning to the Element

2011-11-10T11:27:00.001-08:00

In August we transitioned all Google-hosted Custom Search Engines to the Custom Search Element. Now we are transitioning iframe CSEs as well. No work is required from CSE owners. Moving from the iframe option to the Element enables those CSEs to take advantage of our latest features, like automatic thumbnails.

If you had an iframe CSE, we encourage you to visit your Control Panel to find new tools for customized presentation and results. As always, we appreciate your feedback in the user forum.

Posted by: Liang Ch'ng, Software Engineer

The power of structured search: a new job search engine for military veterans

2011-11-08T09:06:00.000-08:00

As we announced in our Official Google Blog post, Custom Search technology is powering the new National Resource Directory (NRD) job search engine of more than 500,000 job openings from employers around the country. This initiative is a creative application of structured search to provide a highly customized search experience.

Want to learn more about how this works? First of all, like all custom search engines, this uses the power and scale of Google search to constantly crawl the web, looking for structured data to add to the Google index. In this case, sites like simplyhired.com have added JobPosting markup from Schema.org to their sites to help search engines identify veteran-committed job openings, job title, job location, etc.

Recognizing that many job seekers are interested in jobs in their local area, the NRD did some extra work to support a location-based search. When a user specifies a location such as a city or a zipcode in a search, the location is converted into a list of nearby cities with normalized names that match those location markups in the job posting webpages.

To restrict results to only the relevant job postings, for every user query on their site, NRD sends a well formed query request to Google Custom Search including structured search operators such as filtering by cities and job codes and sorting by date to receive XML results and render them on their site.

We’re happy to contribute to this important initiative and hope the power of Google Custom Search can help more businesses to deliver creative search solutions for their users.

Posted by: Hui Xu, Technical Lead, Custom Search Team

Thumbnail images in search results -- no work required!

2011-11-01T10:01:00.000-07:00

A picture is worth more than a thousand words when it helps search users choose the result they want. With this in mind, some webmasters have gone to a lot of effort providing thumbnails in rich snippets to improve the presentation and usability of their search results pages. We’re happy to announce that with our latest layout improvement, Custom Search Element users who have not manually added thumbnails will get them without any additional work.

Now, Custom Search crawls your site to find representative images and automatically adds them to your search results snippets. That’s it. No effort required from you. Here’s an example of how they improve the search results on Mashable.com:

To learn more about automatic thumbnails (and how to disable them), see our Help Center.

Automatic thumbnails are only available with the Custom Search Element. If you are using an iframe CSE, switch to the Element to ensure that you always have the most up-to-date features.

We hope you and your visitors enjoy this new feature. Early reviews have been positive and we look forward to your feedback.

Posted by Edison Nica, Software Engineer

Manage Custom Search Engines from within Webmaster Tools

2011-10-12T14:34:00.000-07:00

Many Custom Search users also regularly use Webmaster Tools. To make their lives more convenient, we’ve added a “Custom Search” feature to the Labs section of Webmaster Tools. This allows you to change your basic configuration, including the list of sites to search, and get the new code without leaving Webmaster Tools.

For users who have never created a Custom Search Engine, it helps you get started by automatically creating a default CSE that searches the current site selected in Webmaster Tools.

We hope these new features make it easier for you to provide a great search experience for visitors to your site. And as always, we welcome your feedback.

Posted by Sharon Xiao, Software Engineering Intern, and Ying Huang, Software Engineer

It’s now easier to set up Google Analytics Site Search tracking for your Custom Search Engine

2011-09-27T14:47:00.000-07:00

Google Analytics Site Search reports provide extensive data on how people search your site once they are already on it. You can see initial searches, refinements, search trends, which pages they searched from, where they ended up, and conversion correlation. In the past we admit that setup was a little challenging, but we’re happy to announce that now we’ve made it easy to setup Site Search tracking directly from your Custom Search Engine.

If you are already a Google Analytics user (and your site has the Google Analytics tracking code on its pages), go to the Custom Search Engine management page, select your CSE’s control panel and click on Google Analytics from the left-hand menu. We’ll display a list of your Google Analytics web properties so you can select one and tell us the query and category parameters that you want to track.

Once you save your changes, we’ll generate a new code snippet. Copy it from the Get Code page, paste it into your site and setup is complete!

You can then access Site Search reports from the Content section of Google Analytics.

Happy analyzing! If needed, you can find help with setup here and an explanation of the differences between Google Analytics and Custom Search statistics here. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Zhong Wang, Software Engineer

Submit Pagemaps directly to Custom Search

2011-09-19T16:25:00.000-07:00

Custom Search users have long been able to create Richer Snippets by adding Pagemaps to their webpages. Today we’re enabling direct submission of Pagemaps via either Sitemaps or On-Demand Indexing requests. This means you no longer have to modify your pages to expose Pagemaps, or wait for Google to crawl your site to process them. This saves time when you want to make a quick change to your metadata. If you have data you would like to be displayed on your site, such as reviews snippets, you can submit it directly to Google instead of putting it in publicly visible markup on your pages. For added security, you can even choose to add a private key to your Pagemap and we will only serve it in Custom Search results when that key is provided.

We hope you enjoy the added convenience these new submission options offer. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Rui Jiang, Software Engineer

Google-hosted Custom Search Engines now use the Element

2011-08-10T18:25:00.000-07:00

Two months ago we announced that all Google-hosted Custom Search Engines would be upgraded to use the Element. We’re happy to report that that transition is now complete for all Custom Search users. Those that visit the Control Panel will find better tools for customizing the presentation of their CSEs.

Moving to the Element enables us to quickly deliver new features that Custom Search users can easily turn on for their sites and we will soon upgrade all iframe results to use embedded Elements.

As always, we look forward to your feedback.

Posted by: Liang Ch'ng, Software Engineer

Rich results templates out-of-the-box

2011-07-18T18:33:00.000-07:00

We’ve been hard at work making improvements to the Google Custom Search Element that will enhance the look and feel of search results when users type into your custom search query box. You’ll see some of the fruits of these labors starting today. We’ve just launched a set of templates that take advantage of rich snippets markup to provide customized results layouts for specific structured data. Your markup can enhance the display of structured information in addition to enabling the powerful metadata features, such as Sort by Attribute and Restrict to Range that we released last year.

For example, there’s a Review template that will show ratings and expand on-demand to display reviews within a result as shown in the screenshot below:

This specific treatment is used when you use hreview and hreview-aggregate Microformat markup on your pages. Template rendering changes are automatic if you use the Element.

Templates that we now support include: People, Product, Recipe, Organization, Review and Review Aggregate. Try these out at our demo search site. Here’s an example of a Recipe result, using a custom theme.

For more information on markup that you can use for Google.com and Custom Search, please refer to our documentation. Don’t forget that we also support image thumbnails and actions. Further, if you are marking up your pages, you can verify that we recognize the right attributes by using our Rich Snippets Preview Tool.

We are constantly adding support for additional markup formats, so stay tuned. We’re continuing to add innovative features to the Element to help you turbo-charge your Custom Search results presentation. As always, we look forward to your feedback.

Posted by: Edison Nica, Software Engineer

Improved On-Demand Indexing

2011-06-30T11:45:00.001-07:00

When we launched On-Demand Indexing in Custom Search, our goal was to make it possible for you to include your new and changed pages quickly in your website’s search results. Since then, we’ve improved indexing freshness and doubled On-Demand indexing quotas. Today, we’re happy to announce further improvements to On-Demand Indexing that make the process simpler and more flexible.

First, we’re providing a new On-Demand Indexing API, which will allow you to initiate indexing actions programmatically. Your content management systems can trigger these new APIs when new content is being published, so that changes on your website are reflected automatically in Custom Search results.

Previously, you needed to provide validated Sitemaps in Webmaster Tools and then select a Sitemap for On-Demand Indexing in the Custom Search control panel. Now, to make this process simpler, you can submit Sitemaps directly within the Custom Search control panel. At this time, we will only consider URLs that belong to the same host serving the Sitemap and for sites verified by the owner of the Custom Search engine.

The best improvement: we now allow you to delete URLs from inclusion in your search. If a page on your site has been deleted, or has content that is inappropriate and you want to eliminate it from search results right away, you can list the URL in your sitemap and mark it for deletion by using an “expires” tag. For more information on this, and the new On-Demand Indexing API, please refer to our documentation. Based on the type of search engine you own, you have certain quotas for URL indexing and removal. You should be able to verify your quota usage in the control panel.

We hope that these changes make it easier for you to control the search experience for your users. As always, we look forward to your feedback.

Posted by: Rui Jiang, Software Engineer

More Layout Options

2011-06-16T11:27:00.000-07:00

Ever since the launch of Custom Search, users have asked us to provide more flexible options to integrate search into their websites. Today, we’re launching a set of new layout options for your Custom Search experience. If you go to the Look and feel tab, you’ll see a set of new layouts that you can choose from, as shown in the screenshot below.

The Two page and Results only layouts give you more flexibility than the Two column layout, which still requires the search box and results to reside on the same web page.

All of the above layouts are powered by the Custom Search Element. The new Google-hosted layout also embeds the Element on a Google-hosted page. This is because the Element offers greater flexibility and interactivity, font control, better customization using themes and style sheets, out-of-box metadata support for thumbnails and actions, support for client-side control over results presentation, and a superior mobile experience for smart phones and tablets.

There are a couple of additional reasons why all the new layouts use the Element (and we’ll continue to deliver new functionality this way too). We want all Custom Search users to be able to easily turn on upcoming new features on for their site visitors. Consolidating to the Element also allows us deliver features faster.

Along with these new layouts, we are also officially phasing out results presentation via the iframe. If you host results in an iframe today, you will see this option marked deprecated in the Look and Feel tab in the control panel. We encourage you to migrate as soon as possible to one of the Element-based layouts. We plan to replace iframe results soon to use embedded Elements. This will happen first with all existing Google-hosted results pages, which currently embed iframes.

So stay tuned -- there are exciting new features coming to Custom Search. And as always, we welcome your feedback.

Posted by: Ying Huang and Liang Ch'ng, Software Engineers

Transferring ownership of your Site Search engine

2011-06-01T18:08:00.000-07:00

Many of you have requested a simpler process for transferring Google Site Search ownership to a different user. For instance, you may have created, developed and customized your website's search experience under your Google account, but want the long-term management of the search engine to be performed by someone else. In the past, you would have been required to manually export the configuration, import it into a new Site Search instance and then cancel the old instance.

Now, you can very easily transfer the ownership of a Site Search engine to a new user by simply specifying a different Google account email address in the Business Settings tab in the control panel.

Once you’ve provided the appropriate account information for the new administrator account, the following things happen:

A new Site Search engine is created with the identical configuration as your current Site Search engine.
The new Site Search engine is owned and can be administered by the new account owner.
Any unused query quota is transferred to the new Site Search engine.
The new Site Search engine will show the transfer history in the Business settings in the control panel
You can still continue to use the old engine, but ads may be displayed alongside search results and XML access is disabled.

Please note that either you or the new admin will also need to update the Search box code to represent the new Site Search engine ID. You can find this ID in the Basics tab in the control panel, marked “Search Engine unique ID”.

We hope this process makes it easier for you to transfer administration capabilities to the appropriate account owners in your organization. For more details, please refer to the articles on transferring ownership, and recommended post-transfer actions in the help center.

As always, we appreciate your feedback in the user forum.

Posted by: Yong Zhu, Software engineer

More powerful collaboration

2011-04-21T13:38:00.000-07:00

Until now, CSE has had a simple collaboration feature that lets the owner of a custom search engine invite friends or colleagues to contribute sites, and assign labels to these sites. This was useful in expanding the scope of a search engine, but beyond expanding indexing, it limited what collaborators were able to do.

Starting today, we’re replacing the current collaboration options with more powerful shared administration features. Through Admin accounts, a new tab in your control panel, you can now invite collaborators to become shared administrators. Admin accounts have capabilities similar to those of the owner, but they cannot access the Make Money (advertising) tab or create additional admin accounts.
In line with these enhancements, we will be removing the Collaboration tab in a month. In the mean time, as an owner of a custom search engine, you can easily migrate existing sites from the Collaboration tab to your search engine definition and, if you like, upgrade existing collaborators to Admin accounts to give them shared administrator privileges. When we remove the Collaboration tab we will automatically migrate all sites but will not automatically upgrade all collaborators to admin accounts - so if you do want to keep existing collaborators on your site we recommend you migrate them today, or you can add them back manually later.

We hope you’ll find these shared admin capabilities more powerful. Let us know what you think in our discussion forum.

Posted by: Rui Jiang and Abhishek Rajgarhia, Software Engineers.